I just had similar sticker shock recently to the remote access service for Home Assistant, which is $6.50/mo. You still have to host and maintain HA locally, the service just allows you to easily access it remotely.
Or Kagi Search, which charges $25/mo for unlimited searches.
For me, if it’s more than $5/mo it better be something I really need.
I think nearly $100 a year is steep for something that doesn't meet my needs (I use a community sync plugin instead). So I made a one-time donation instead because I still want to support the core product. I only recently realised you can do this: https://help.obsidian.md/Licenses+and+payment/Catalyst+licen...
And I'm one of those people (there's dozens of us!), hence why I said it's a bit steep for me.
I can afford to spend some money on subscriptions (~$70-80/month last time I summed it up), but that sum means a lot more to me than it does to someone earning six figures. I have to budget it between dozens of different services that all want a small amount on a monthly basis.
But you're right, I do use it every day, which is why I have decided to allocate some of that amount to pay for a feature that I can absolutely replicate without paying. Similarly, some of that amount goes to NGOs even though I also don't get anything tangible out of it.
It's also hard to do micro payments on the internet ironically, on that 8$ you can easily pay almost a dollar of fees. If that wasnt the case I expect we would have a much different internet...